Should we all do a boycott of Amazon ads for a specific day, turn off our ads for 24 hours, just in protest at something. New fees/new seller central. We have a co-ordinated ‘black out on Ads’ maybe then they might bring something to table to help us.
Some of us have employees to pay, heath insurance to provide, families to feed. I am not putting a warehouse workers wages at risk for…
For some it might be as simple as, a day of not spending money, for others it could be the only thing keeping their listings on page 1 or in position 1, which would cost additional lost sales as competitors will gladly move up and take your spot at #6, 3, 1 etc.
I would assert if one feels so strongly about something, not selling there is the real way to go. We vehemently disagree with Ebay’s lack of IP protections, so instead of not advertising there, we don’t sell anything there anymore. Our business’ that sell other peoples things still operate there, but two of our business spoke with our checkbook and won’t come back.
I believe your cause is noble, but marketplaces are not always a place for noble ideas.
We don’t run ads, except for one vertical product set, that no one else makes and it is obscure in nature. It has a very high ROAS 12-80. A few bucks a month if that.
Nothing that we could boycott, we walked away from ads many years ago when other sellers started gaming the system and Amazon has NO transparency in how those ads are served or clicked on.
You are suggesting a boycott just to see if a boycott works, but you don’t have any specific thing you are protesting – just throwing out two suggestions. There’s no need to protest something that you don’t even feel strongly enough about to solidly state – especially just to test boycotting as a protest strategy.
I placed an order for a supplement today.
Ordered from an ad, lowest unit cost available, and an Amazon Choice Badge.
Given the number of competitive products, I would not have wasted the time on all of the listings for my $9.95 purchase.
No ads, I would have ordered from Walmart. It is really easy to ignore all 3P sellers on Walmart and have a manageable number of choices.
I would be careful about boycotts, they can lead buyers to sample and like a competitive internet site.
I think it would be more logical to address issues. The surcharge I can’t say anything…fuel is through the roof and cost of logistics is insane. The new seller central is a mishap idea made by people who don’t actually sell. But Amazon has been reaching out to sellers to get feedback from them and seller support has been active to address issues. It was missing the next arrow on orders, fixed. It wasn’t saving settings, fixed. They are actually trying to get things right, in fact they are now re-hiring people they let go in the lay offs.
Not defending anyone in particular, but I think a boycott needs specifics and not a general frustration. If you are really unhappy on the platform, it might not be the right one for you. Personally, I feel the last few months have been really hopeful. Seller support is fixing issues on the first submission. They are reaching out to sellers for feedback. They rolled back the ai dependency and are re-hiring developers. Definitely a better direction than YouTube is going in. They are heading for Amazon 2 years ago where everything was bots and you couldn’t get help with incorrect automated takedowns for anything.
I had a seller support agent yesterday work on a GTIN error for 2 hours yesterday then kept the ticket open until it worked. Another one spent almost 3 hours trying to fix a “missing title” error until they finally had to escalate it, after we tried a ton of things to get it to stick. Its been years since Amazon has cared that much about fixing things. I am hopeful.